Why does Robin Lane Fox have to drag his sexual fantasies into a review of a garden book?

Let's face it. If I had had a good review from Robin Lane Fox I would have been worried – a sign that I (and by extention Piet Oudolf) had sold out, joined the establishment, become a safe pair of hands, retired to planting petunias and pruning hybrid tea roses. Like the artists who cherish their rejection from the Royal Academy, we know that condemnation by particular people is a sign that we are doing the right thing. 

Robin Lane Fox is one of those treasures of British life, a long-standing, opinionated and conservative commentator on gardening. He is one of a kind – the 'crusty old fart', who we do particularly well in Britain, annoying, but in the end, rather lovable. The sort who hang around in gentleman's clubs in London or senior common rooms in exclusive Oxford colleges, with an intravenous drip of vintage port into their veins, fulminating at every opportunity about the silly mistakes of the young, the idiocy of letting women into the club, blah, blah, blah and blah. Lane Fox's day job is “Extraordinary Lecturer in Ancient History for both New and Exeter Colleges”. You get the idea – clever chap, just not very clued in to the modern world, the sort of person who when you say “estate” to, thinks of a friend of his with a big house and deer park and a couple of tenant farms 'on the estate', not a crap place to live on the edge of town with a library and swimming pool that's just been shut, and a rip-off bus once an hour into town and the job centre, where the only thing that makes life worth living are the fantastic drifts of flowers that the clever guys from Sheffield University have just done between the tower blocks – this is what 'estate' means to most people. 

 

A pasting from Robin Lane Fox is like a thrashing with a wet lettuce, a back-handed complement playfully received. But quite why he drags in “actress Rosario Dawson, full-frontally naked from head to toe” into a review of a gardening book, I completely fail to appreciate; for God's sake you old goat, leave your sexual fantasies out of reviews of our book – perleeze.

Reading in a bit more detail, Lane Fox is revealing his prejudices a little. He admits of course to subjectivity (what a relief that is); he clearly does not understand that some people want a vision of nature, either in their gardens or their public spaces – that is a big shift in the aesthetic, one of those world-changing paradigm shifts that the ol' boys in leather armchairs in their clubs and senior common rooms had better get used to, the guys who like their double roses and camellias, and peonies out in the quad spaced out neatly with bare earth between them, lined out politely around the outside of that beautifully lush hallowed green, striped grass that no-one is allowed to walk on. And which the rest of us can hardly ever even see, because we are not even allowed in past the porter's lodge.

Our book is addressed to all gardeners and designers of planted spaces: private gardeners, community gardeners, volunteer gardeners, professional gardeners, and of course landscape designers. It is about trying to communicate a vision of nature which may be small-scale and private or big-scale and public. That is quite a challenge to get into one book, but the principles are the same. But the public aspect is important. Lane Fox can sneer about “German garden shows” but the whole point of those German garden shows is that they are about regenerating places which will then give pleasure to the entire community, not just for one summer, but ever more. The whole thrust of the despised “German planting” is actually about making beauty democratically available. Public space has been too often overlooked and under-utilised. Isn't quality public landscape a democratic right? I would like to think that some of what we discuss and show will help bring alive those public spaces, so we can all benefit. 

Here's the book in question: Planting, a new perspective

and another more measured view.

If Robin Lane Fox is not careful he'll end up with a cameo performance in my ongoing soap opera of gardening life, the latest episode of which is just up on Amazon Kindle.

Why do we believe it? Gardeners - fact, myth and downright *******.

Gardening discourse is full of information which is actually wrong. Far more than in many other areas of life - medicine maybe an exception, if the whole wide world of complementary treatments and their journalistic camp followers are included. 'Facts' about plants and how to grow them get circulated which have little or no basis, but seem to take an age to die away, even when exposed. I wonder why?

Maybe it is to do with the fact that we are dealing with living things, always with that element of unpredictability. Driving, or doing DIY projects are simple exercises in cause-and-effect by comparison; natural systems are so much more complex; the results of our interventions often not obvious.

My thinking about this was stimulated by a recent double page spread in The Observer newspaper last Sunday - Nine Garden Myths Debunked. It was the science pages, and flagged up a website I had not heard of before - Garden Professors - hosted by Washington State University's extension service. One of the people behind this is the university's Dr Linda Chalker-Scott, who I had come across before when I discovered her books in the Royal Horticultural Society library in London - readable little guides to what works and what doesn't in the garden. Valuable stuff, especially for those new to gardening, who find it difficult to face down an older and more experienced gardener telling them, in no uncertain fashion that "you must do it this way". Maybe that is the problem - too much learning informally, too much folk-knowledge passed down from unquestioning generation to unquestioning generation. Sometimes circulated by garden writers too.

Actually, the Observer piece set up a bit of an aunt Sally here by including some of the prescriptions of biodynamic gardening/farming (here listed as myth number six), which are so self-evidently dotty that few people this side of cloud-cuckoo land believe them. Bit of an easy target that. The first myth debunked, that of compost tea, did make me think about the sources of myth though. This particular myth is, I think, a relatively modern one, the result of pseudo-science emanating from the organic movement, who have been particularly prone to generating new myths. Number two - Lighten clay by adding sand, is, I think, actually more interesting as myth, as it has been around an awful long time (Victorian days?) and is devoid of any of the 'muck and magic' ideological overtones of the organic movement. The truth about myths no. three and eight - Young trees should be staked and Add bonemeal and compost when planting trees, have been known 'in the profession' a long time, but has not got out into the amateur world sufficiently. Given how hard it is to buy decent tree stakes, this is jolly good news. Sun through water burns leaves is another Victorian one I suspect, as are Tree wounds need dressing and Gravel helps containers to drain. Myth nine - Natural is safer is a rejoinder to the organic movement.

Nine is just a start - there are many more out there.

Interesting that a national newspaper decided to devote its two page science section to the subject of gardening myths. Shows how important we are perhaps, or maybe how prone to delusion. I can't help feeling that as old myths die, new ones take their place. There is an awful lot of belief involved in gardening, or to be more precise there are belief systems which people cling to, sometimes with an almost evangelical fervour.  The organic movement in particular has had its fair share of 'true believers'. Permaculture too - why do people get so fanatical about it. Is this gardening as religion?  

One of the problems with gardening myths is that few of us really make good scientists (I include myself here). A lot of us 'experiment', by which we mean try something different and see if it works. But setting up a trial with a proper control and being really disciplined about it takes time and very often space. We are far more likely to try something one year, and something else the next, and then draw the conclusion that whatever worked best, must be best, although a thousand and one variables would have affected the results. If we do do a full trial, making sense of the results is often far more complicated than we imagine possible when we set out - science often does not give clear results.

One source of myth is, I suspect, is the gardener who always does something a particular way, and being a good all-round gardener, the results are good, so they make the mistake of assuming that because they have always done it that way then there is a relationship between  a particular course of action and the results. In fact the course of action may be neutral, irrelevant or even harmful, but its effects outweighed by other beneficial courses of action. I once met someone who grew orchids in pots with the bottoms of the pots permanently immersed in water, and which she promoted as 'the way to grow orchids' - which any orchid grower would describe as madness, as these are plants which need impeccable drainage. She must have been doing a few other things right, as her plants seemed happy enough though.

I suspect that as old myths die, new ones come to take their place. Today, I suspect we have an unholy alliance between marketing boosters and journalists on the one hand and the commercially minded wing of the organic movement on the other. I am also old enough (55) to see myths develop. Just to take one example, the extraordinary growth of the idea of raised beds for growing vegetables. I think it was Lawrence D. Hills who started this - he was a pioneer of the 'rational' wing of the organic movement in the 1950s and 1960s (as opposed to either the 'magical' biodynamic crowd or the bunch of mystics and fascists involved in setting up the post-war Soil Association). Hills had various ideas about why raised beds are a good idea, chief of which was the idea of avoiding soil compaction (you don't walk on your raised beds).

Raised beds can be a good idea for various reasons. In particular, those of us who are getting a bit creaky find it much easier to tend veg plants at a little above ground level (we have three, about 15% of our veg plot). But there are so many disadvantages: they heat up and cool down more quickly than the ground does, they are singularly inconvenient for root veg, they need considerable work in constructing - like finding all that soil to fill them with. Yet so many gardeners feel that they have to grow their veg in them. They are a manufacturers and salesman's dream - all that wood (and preservative) or plastic or whatever. No wonder the mail-order catalogues and the garden centres are full of 'raised bed kits'. The wooden ones (i.e. most of them) only last x amount of time before they rot and collapse. The worst, from the sustainability point of view, are railway sleeper beds - all that wood, what a waste! The hold over novice gardeners that they have to grow their veg in raised beds has become quite extraordinary. Another myth to combat!

The joys of spring

There are surprisingly few good spring gardens around. So often, a 'spring garden' consists of drifts of daffodils let loose in grass. Very nice, but so easy to do, it hardly counts as gardening once its done, just mowing at the right time. Then there are that small number of gardens where there are thousands of tulips, which, given that tulips are generally one-year wonders, means that the cost, not only of tulips but of putting them in, limits this form of horticultural expression to the very wealthy. And in times of austerity, such flaunting of wealth is perhaps a little rude (I remember Prince Charles planting tulips in meadow grass once, I don't suppose even his budget allows a repeat of that gesture; if it is, I look forward to the appropriate peasants' revolt throwing down the gates to Highgrove).

So, I was very glad to finally get round to visiting Olive Mason's garden in Worcestershire a few weeks ago, a garden well and truly full of the joys of spring. She opens for her snowdrops in Feb (for the NGS) and hopefully one day might do later too. A medium-sized and very intensely planted garden clearly relies on clipped box and perennials for its impact most of the year, but amongst these are a great number of bulbs and spring-flowering perennials. For many years, Olive has looked after a severely disabled son at home, and making and maintaining a garden has been something which she could do, whilst caring for him. Clearly, she spends a lot of time gardening, but at the same time it is an example of what I call intelligent management – a great deal of self-seeding and spreading is allowed or even encouraged, and so weeding and other plant control is very much like sub-editing – dealing with the detail.

Corydalis 'G.P. Baker'

Olive's plant management encourages what is key to making a good spring garden which then turns into a good summer garden – integration. Most spring-performing plants have a different annual cycle to summer-performing; they grow at lower temperatures, and by the time they are dying back, the summer species are coming into growth. Their growth cycles are complementary, so it is possible to shoehorn both into almost the same space. Summer perennials, and bulbs, and spring-flowering but summer-dormant perennials can be cheek by jowl. Those which are not summer dormant, such as many primulas, cannot be quite so close, but will still tolerate summer shading by taller perennials. Given this neat complementarity, it is possible to think of having two, completely different, planting schemes: spring and summer/autumn. A summer planting scheme, as it uses larger plants with a longer period of growth, can be the 'main' one, and then the spring planting can be thought of as another layer, dropped on top. The only real points of interaction will be perennial clumps emerging amongst the bulbs and spring perennials; for the most part these will just be blobs of background green, but a few with dark foliage (peonies and Anthriscus sylvestris 'Ravenswing') do look very nice alongside the predominantly blues and yellows of spring.

Primula wanda types seed attractively, low enough to fit in a variety of places.

...even seeding beneath a box hedge.

Visiting Dial Park made me realise how much harder I must work at this. We have plenty of Barnhaven primulas and Primula elatior which is simply the toughest primula out, some daffodils (not as many as I'd like, as so many have rotted off in our wet ground) and a few scatterings of scillas and muscari. Primula wanda will be on the seed shopping list this summer, nicely coloured very short and very spready primulas for seeding around the front of borders and amongst perennials. And I must try harder with corydalis – C. solida clearly seeds well.

Thinking of a garden as a two layer project: spring and summer, seems a good thing to keep in mind, one of those ways of looking, which can be very useful.

Good integration between bulbs and summer perennials in this and following pictures.

The vandal in the park - Margaret Thatcher

Council contractor planting team April 2006. Good people. They deserve better.

Margaret Thatcher had an impact on everything that happened in Britain, and in a way still does. She was not known to have any particular interest in gardening or landscape, but her effect on Britain's public urban landscapes was enormous, and arguably, very indirectly, on a particular era of private garden design too (but more of that another time). Here I'd like to reflect on what she set in motion has affected our public parks and other planted greenspace. It has important lessons.

Those who are not British, were too young at the time or indeed who benefited from her rule (1979-1990) have no idea of the sheer loathing, the deep and visceral hatred she inspired in those at the sharp end of her policies. Change is always difficult (and an awful lot in Britain in 1979, when she was elected, was in desperate need of change), but it was her seeming contempt for the whole idea of community which caused so much suffering and anger. For everyone who admired her leadership and policies there was at least another who found her arrogant to the point of being dictatorial, viciously divisive and intolerant (of opposition and of minorities). After a decade or so of privatising state assets (sometimes to our benefit, but more usually to the benefit of those who bought the underpriced shares) she turned her attention to our public parks – which are a community resource if they are anything, and it is an irony that the privatisation of their management occurred in the very last year of her rule.

In 1990, Compulsory Competitive Tendering was introduced, so that the management of parks and greenspace had to be put put to companies who bid for the services – the most competitive (i.e. the cheapest) winning the contract. The impact was “horrendous” in the words of Ivor Stokes, who had a career in Swansea parks and ended up as Curator of Swansea Botanical Complex. “A lot of young people used to get apprenticeships with the parks... that all went” he recalls. Park services, like the railways, and to some extent the other state-owned industries had something which cannot be expressed in monetary terms – a culture, which passes on knowledge from one generation of the workforce to another, but also shares that knowledge within the profession. Park services used to be run “very hierarchically” says Ivor, but everyone would have horticultural training and people could work their way up. The new system involved contractor companies providing services, with managers who knew nothing about horticulture and unskilled staff, who only knew how to mow and cut, “you had time and motion people assessing jobs, and staff decision making replaced by computer-driven programmes instead... its week ten, so we can to cut all the shrubs now, just the other day I saw some forsythia which isn't going to flower because it had been cut back by someone on schedule”. Horticulture cannot be managed with this kind of dogmatic inflexibility.

Not surprisingly, standards plummeted, young people lost the opportunity to move into a healthy and interesting (if badly paid) profession where there was a real opportunity for progression, and many public spaces simply got duller, less well managed and often more dangerous. I remember in Bristol staff employed by one company (contracted to manage parks) would throw rubbish into the playgrounds (managed by another company), who would throw it back again. It summed up the shambles of the whole exercise. My conversations with parks staff always revealed deep frustration at the lack of opportunity to use and develop their skills, at the way management failed to respect them, and how everything was dominated by the need to cut costs.

Although quality plummeted, the very best parks were rescued, thanks to Baroness Trumpington who introduced a bill in the House of Lords to keep parks of botanical and historical interest in public ownership – hence Ivor's job at Swansea. It was a rare victory in a decade of government assets (which we all own and have some political control over) being sold off, and workforces being made redundant or de-skilled.

The decline in quality in public greenspace, the loss of jobs, the loss of skills and accumulated knowledge was symptomatic of what happened in the Thatcher years. The well-off generally did not notice, but for people who lived in working class communities, who saw factories and mines shut, public services reduced, public housing sold off and not replaced – what they saw was a heartless contemptuous vandalism. Contracting out in the parks was like so much else done in these years, not done to improve quality but done for reasons of political ideology and to save money.

Not that pre-1990 parks and greenspace was a golden age. Not at all. (Small 'c') conservatism, funding cuts and a rather dreary lack of imagination meant that there had been little in the way of innovation for years. I came across a rather interesting survival of this old mentality a few weeks ago. Shouldn't say where yet, until I do more research, but it is a council-run botanical garden that was in danger of sliding into being yet another mediocre park. The council wanted shot of it, sold it to a Community Interest Company who then engaged a business consultant who was passionate about the place. The chap in question has now invested a considerable sum of his own money into the place in order to turn it around. The whole thing was like one of those TV programmes where the business whizz kid goes into to rescue the failing country house or whatever. The entrepreneur described to me the great difficulty of finding out what went on, who did what, when they did it, or to get staff to change age-old working practices, such as working at weekends (when most of the public visit) etc. etc. It was a good example of 'the bad old days' that has given local government in Britain a bad name, and of course helped open the door to Thatcherism. The garden in question will be very interesting to watch. First signs are very hopeful - and again, more later.

There has to be a better way – to modernise the way public space is managed yet maintain flexibility. Germany, Sweden, Holland, France, all have much better parks and greenspace, although all very different. There are different emphases on public and private ownership, but what actually counts is a political commitment to continually improving quality, openness to innovation and a career path for staff.

Suburbia, red in tooth and claw

On a recent trip to the US I found myself in several conversations with people about animals in the garden. Some astonishment that we do not have coyotes in Britain, nor racoons, or groundhogs, and that our deer are relatively small and tend to run off at the mere glimpse or whiff of a human, and unless you are very unlucky, do little damage to the garden. There's a lot more wildlife out there in those American woods, and for gardeners a lot more capacity for damage. The deer for a start, are enormous, and remarkably fearless. No wonder so many gardeners get obsessed with them, or more accurately how to keep them out. Actually they are a much more serious problem, as nature reserves and other areas of habitat can suffer some pretty serious impact from continued deer browsing - to the point of major ecological damage.

Soon after I got back I got an email from Helen Yoest in Raleigh, NC, with a book review about this very issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/visitors/?pagination=falseHow the woods are reclaiming the suburbs and the wildlife problems that result, or is it the suburbs invading the woods? Interesting stuff, and something which follows on from my recent blog with the rather lurid Martha Schwartz quote. The first few generations of European settlers felled every tree in sight, farmed, then realised that much of the land was too poor, and moved west, to plough up the much more fertile prairie. The woodland fought back. Very successfully. Whereas in Britain, woodland re-establishes itself through a fairly slow process, in the US, I feel that if all human beings disappeared one day (selective gamma ray burst that leaves other species standing?), then ten years later there would almost be no trace left of their presence. Trees re-establish so quickly. The upshot is that much of the area where people live is actually forest: roads, houses, gardens etc. are carved out of the forest. The wildlife, deer especially, have bounced back from the days when they hunted by anyone and everyone, to enormous numbers, numbers which in the absence of enough predators (i.e. not enough coyotes, bears, wolves, guys with guns who can shoot straight) have rocketed. Not good for gardeners, not actually very good for the environment, or even for the health of deer populations. For much of the wildlife, humanity is no longer a threat, but a source of food and habitat.

I am reminded of the British equivalent, the urban fox; cities support far more foxes than the countryside - all those bins to raid, discarded take-away meals, food left out for hedgehogs etc. No longer afraid, the wild animals creep back. Except that having exterminated all the big predators centuries ago (wolves, wild cats, bears, lynx) the urban wildlife we have is very unbalanced. Bring back the wolf? except that the farmers would complain (more than farmers complain anyway) and I somehow don't see large predators being welcome in British cities and suburbs.

Deer clearly need intelligent culling, and a more natural source of meat cannot be imagined. But in both the US and Britain, any mention of a cull brings storms of protest - often from people who are quite happy to sit down and eat meat from farmed animals. Another symptom of a failure to engage with the realities of life on earth.

What is so strange about this suburban woodland which so many US citizens choose to live in, is the extreme contrast with areas deemed to be landscaped: the vast deserts of grass mown to within an inch of its life, the extensive mulchscape which surround 'plantings' of evergreen shrubs ruthlessly pruned into meatballs. Much US landscaping and its management seems to express almost a hatred of vegetation, or as often with hatred, is it really fear (as with misogynist men). Or is it just job-creation? In the land of the ruthless corporate downsize, it seems strange that so many hands are paid to keep doing what is so apparently pointless. At one stage I got talking to a guy who worked as a landscape architect, he was fairly new into his career and was clearly on the bottom rung, designing landscapes for MacDonalds outlets etc.; he had almost no room for creativity - local zoning/planning requirements are incredibly prescriptive about how many shrubs had to be planted, what size, spacing etc. Driving through the junkscape outside Raleigh: endless auto retail outlets, strip malls, fast food outlets, box stores, made me feel very depressed. Such waste of space, such mediocrity on an epic scale, such obsession with control, above all the CONFORMITY. The conformity that we expected from Soviet communism, but which these supposedly free citizens embraced.

 Will it ever change? I thought about the various people over the years I have met who have fought for the right to grow meadow or prairie in their front yards. It is a battle that is still being fought, against the totalitarian instincts of lawn ordinances and neighbourhood associations. Thinking of the Highline, and the other projects which it is beginning to inspire which embrace wildness, I realised that it may be a very slow process, but things are changing. And - that I, with my writing and lecturing, am part of this process. My first American lecture tour was in 1996, as part of a group, organised by Horticulture magazine and called 'Wild Style'. My realisation made me feel less depressed, and left me with a strange feeling of subversive power; I, chuntering down the freeway in my anonymous rental Ford Fiesta (BTW Ford have a green roof on their Dearborn, MI, plant) am doing something about this. The ability of nature to take back lost ground is so obvious here, much more so than at home, it only needs permission. Let's give it, but remember, it will have some consequences which we need to be brave and sensible about.

Plant Delights Nursery

A particularly delicious Trillium underwoodii form.

Tony Avent's Plant Delights Nursery near Raleigh in North Carolina is legendary. 20,000 plus taxa. Primarily for the huge range of plants of course, but also for its display garden, its whacky sculpture and provocative, hate-mail-generating cartoon catalogue covers. Plant Delights shows that it is possible to stand out againt the herd and run a successful business selling a huge range of plants, many of them distinctly slow to grow.

Asarum takoi 'Roundabout'

Organisation is key here; everything is incredibly tidy, and very well-labelled. With an emphasis on woodland species, you can wander around, see and photograph more new plants in a couple of hours than many would believe possible. Researchers get involved too – for them the meticulously labelled clumps of innumerable geographic and other forms of plants are perfect material.

One of several dry berms, mostly but not entirely for dry land stuff.

“I'm very keen on ex situ conservation” says Tony, “although everyone bangs on about conserving plants in their place”. He has a point, habitat destruction can wipe out a rare variant of a species out overnight, but well-labelled collections in a protected location like this, will ensure survival. What's more, the public display of such a vast array of biodiversity is powerfully educational in its own right.

The soil here is very sandy, very acid, and was stripped of its nutrients by a century plus of tobacco farming (this is the greediest of crops). Wood mulch is used for the paths, and as it rots it gets shovelled onto borders, so steadily building up the humus content. Apart from some berms of imported soil and gravel, largely used for dry habitat plants, little effort is made to provide special soil conditions for plants; Tony is adamant that one size pretty well fits all here, he stabs a finger at an agave sitting next to an azalea on one of the berms to prove the point.

These are Rohdea.

 The whole, ten acre plus, site is managed as a rain garden, so as little water is allowed to run off as possible, and all water from the greenhouses (the only environment in which synthetic fertilizers are used) is cleaned by running through beds of wetland vegetation.

Water detention is a part of the nursery's rain garden approach to water management

I was there frustratingly early in the year. Trilliums were just beginning to show, and they illustrate perfectly Tony's passion for genetic diversity, with vast numbers of distinct forms on display, and thousands of seedlings coming up in the glasshouses. With their often exquisite leaf markings and mysteriously-coloured flowers, these are the ultimate collector plants. The US south-east is a major centre of diversity for them.

This is a floating island made from old drinks bottles, gently moving round the largest pool in the wind. 

Natural biodiversity may be the central passion, but Tony also oversees a number of breeding programmes to improve the plants available to gardeners; primarily with Epimedium, Baptisia and Hellebore. “With hellebores” he says, “we practice redneck breeding, just putting together groups of plants we want to cross, isolated from others, and let the bees get on with it.”

I can't wait to get back at another time of year.

Trillium maculatum

Episode Seven of Dig, Plant and Bitch, the world's only soap opera for gardeners is now available.
Iris stakes her claim
For years, Iris and Johnny Dalton have rather treated the almost-abandoned walled garden at Mere Castle as their own territory. Now aware that the Watkins-Smythes are thinking of renting it out, Iris decides to take matters into her own hands. Elsewhere, garden designer Sebastian Gilling-Jones is discovering that being a TV gardening personality pays a heavy price; nurseryman James Treasby increasingly feels like he is running a remedial class in basic horticulture, the Watkins-Smythes and their rivals, Wayne and Petunia Martin are playing a war of nerves over supplies of cakes for their respective tea-rooms, while Petunia makes a discovery that might be good news for local connoisseur gardeners, but will not be welcomed at Treasby’s Plants of Distinction.

Ever green in North Carolina

Prunus mume, an exquisite early-flowering plum,  thrives in the South, where the hot sticky summers are so much like its native Far East, almost ungrowable in England because of fungal diseases,. So unfair!

Don't they just luurve their evergreens in the South?
Am currently in North Carolina doing some lectures, brought here by the Davidson Symposium next week. I last came her 21 years ago, on the my first trip ever to the US. Its one one of those places which is a real gardening hot-spot. At the weather feels like home - cold - but the camellias are flowering well, and that's what reminds you that you are in the South. Look more closely, and you see lots of of evergreens. They are a big part of the garden culture here. Partly I suppose its because there are some very good native evergreens here, such as Magnolia grandiflora and M. virginiana, some good hollies including the charmingly named Ilex vomitoria. Partly also I suppose its a mark of distinction - most evergreens get treated very badly by the weather north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Buxus sempervirens 'Dee Runk'

Box, or boxwood as the natives so quaintly call it, has always been grown from, and often grown in a different way to the way Europeans treat it - it hasn't always been clipped, but sometimes allowed to grow free; I remember years ago visiting the Cathedral Garden in DC and seeing box 'grown loose', and rather liking it. If you always clip box you are not actually going to be that interested in what shapes it adopts naturally, whereas if you let it loose, then the shape is going to be very important. So people here started collecting and selecting different cultivars, so there has always been much more awareness here than back home of the genetic diversity of box.

Arbutus unedo 'Elfin King'. Whoever named this was a bit optimistic about it being dwarf, but the leaves are very distinctive.

One place I was really confronted with the incredible diversity of evergreens available here, and indeed of woody plants generally (try and find a nursery that does an interesting range of woodies in Britain now) was Camellia Forest Nursery, where Bri Gluvna Arthur had invited me to drop in. I didn't go to see camellias, which quite honestly, if I wanted a flower like a piece of soap I'd buy the soap. Polytunnel packed with loads of plants which i have never heard of - which always gets me excited, especially since most of them would be growable back home: Distyllum, Eurya, Gordonia, Schima, Serissa, then loads of species of genera where we have only a limited selection back home like Osmanthus and Illicium, or general we really couldn't grow outside like Gardenia  and Cinnamomum.

Ilex 'Carolina Sentinel' - a very nice upright-growing holly. The hollies here are wonderful.

Then to be fair to Camellia, BTW, of which there are 100+ species, there were some wonderful camellias here. I've always loved 'Cornish Snow' with little white single flowers, many of the species look like that, but with many different variations in their foliage: nice n'smelly C. odorata, C. fraterna and many more.

Not just a nice smell - Gardenia augusta 'Michael'

Would you believe it, this is a camellia - C. sasanqua 'Silverado'.

While a lot of evergreens were showing signs of winter stress, boxes in particular, this shrub (trained as a standard) looked incredibly fresh and unfazed; I was very impressed by the quality of the foliage, it's an intergeneric hybrid involving Raphiolepis and Eriobotrya (loquat) - x Raphiobotrya 'Conda'.

Another chance to appreciate the southern love of evergreens, and the incredibly adventurous US nursery industry is the Paul C. Ciener Botanic Garden where I did my first lecture of this little tour. The botanic garden isn't there yet, but it will be; they have a car park and a very nice building, and the first plantings, a plan, and what looks like the ability to pull in sponsorship and achieve things. Horticulturalist Adrienne Roethling has got the enviable job of gardening the place into existence, she worked for Plant Delights Nursery for 8 years ("we call it graduate school round here" Bri Arthur says), so almost every plant is one which is new on me, and all incredibly well-labelled. Its all a very good start to what should be an exceptional small-town botanic garden. Kernersville is a lucky place.

Look! the agave has impaled that SUV! If only. The car park at the Ciener Botanic Garden. Notice the kerb insets for sempervivum.

Euphorbia rigida, in the planting above, good early colour, and superior to myrsinites. Must get it.

A great idea planting up the border between the fence and the sidewalk.The hell-strip though is going to take some more determined plant selection though. Yucca rostrata is clearly visible, and its soft enough not to risk impaling small dogs.

There will be a garden here one day.

And it will look like this!